My wife and I spent a little time this summer at Brittany’s Valley of the Saints. And what a great concept it is. High on a domed hill, commanding views over the depopulated landscape all around it, the setting for the sculpture park is spectacular. The figures represent local saints, frequently concerning themselves with farming and fishing, reflecting life as it was lived in the region until comparatively recently. With submissions from such a wide pool of sculptors, it’s inevitable that the standard varies. In any case, it’s all subjective, I guess, so here are some of my favourites (and isn’t that the late Sir William Golding holding the fish?)…

A week at the writing den soon passed. I made far less progress than I’d hoped for on my almost-finished manuscript. On the other hand, I recharged my sadly depleted creative batteries. I read Michael Krüger’s highly entertaining ‘The Executor’. I went on some wonderful rural stomps, including a stroll around the surreal sculpture park below. I saw a green woodpecker and a raven. I ate lots of good food too.

I also returned to a remote and inaccessible bay. It’s quite possibly my favourite spot on earth. Being early April, the waters of the Western Channel were far too cold to swim in. I had to settle for sitting on a rock and dipping my welly boots into its jade green but icy water. It’s a place where all cares and worries go whistling away, if only for a short while. The photo below does no justice at all to the beauty of this place. Ho hum…

I also explored some new places. I had sailed out of Dieppe countless times but never looked around the town. From the ferry it looks uninteresting. Closer to, it turns out to be a ramshackle delight, with grand old churches and a cliff-top medieval castle. By sheer coincidence, I have just picked out Henrik Stangerup’s ‘The Seducer’ as the next read from my bookshelves. It’s subtitled ‘It’s Hard to Die in Dieppe’… Now I’m looking forward all the more to reading it.

So now it’s back to the grind of the day job and of life with all its hassles. Hopefully, somewhere in amongst it all, I’ll find the time and energy to complete my manuscript this year. In the meantime, here’s a tiny extract. I’ve been much concerned with games, perhaps because my children and I have played numerous games of Cluedo during the holidays…

The Kaffe Muzeesmis is another haunt of the old chess players. A number of barstools have been crammed against a counter at the end of the compartment. This leaves room for a single table at which games may be played. More often than not, the combatants will be Vikktur Kiirilavnas and Valentiin Krutt. They seem to be working their way through the same restricted and highly symbolic set of moves, as though playing a handful of games from memory. Are these exhibition matches, then? Perhaps. Certainly, they will frequently draw the attention of the other customers, who watch in rapt silence from the bar.

In the first game, Kiirilavnas plays black. He undertakes a ruthless demolition of his opponent’s forces, removing piece after piece in rapid succession. This opening has become known as Kiirilavnas’ Defence. The older man seems to take particular pleasure in the early capture of white’s bishops and in his deferred pursuit of the queen. But it is those black rooks, the kjerntuurr that appear key to every move. In the second game, Krutt is red. Now it’s the younger man’s turn to go on the offensive. In a breath-taking display of attacking play, he deploys his knights to deadly effect and the red king or krevnkunikk in an unusually advanced position. His opponent offers little resistance. It’s maat in eighteen moves. For the third game, Kiirilavnas is white. He plays a highly skilled, counter-attacking game, combining his knights and bishops to destroy his opponent’s defences and soon the black king is staring defeat in the face. The fourth game sees Krutt draw level again, providing a textbook demonstration in the offensive possibilities of the board’s most powerful piece. This is Kruut’s Gambit. The white queen or bjeldronikk controls the game almost from the debut to its endgame, supported by the merciless thrusts of her bishops. The opposing pawns are soon under her command and then, for black, the game is up. The old men include in their repertoire a few examples of the modern game, played at irregular intervals – one where Krutt wins swiftly as black, another in which Kiirilavnas sweeps to victory as red – nevertheless, you’d only have to spend a few afternoons observing play at the Museum Café before you’d find the familiar patterns re-asserting themselves, the same four exercises being played out, with minor variations, those sequences to which the players always seem to return. History repeats itself as tragedy then farce, cataclysm then slapstick, catastrophe then stand-up…